Month: March 2016

Some mistakes teach, and some can kill you. The challenge is to know one from the other.

We all make mistakes. Itâ€™s part of our untidy human condition. The interesting question is how to reduce the severity of the mistakes we make, and how to deal with them when they happen. Making the right mistakes means that we learn and grow. The wrong mistakes put a permanent damper on our future.

When we encounter a death, we are apt to spend time thinking about the qualities of the deceased, often in ways that we did not during their lives. Perhaps this has to do with our search for meaning – our need to associate purpose and significance with important events. By engaging in this process of holding and celebrating the lives of those who have died, we honor them, and place them and ourselves in a circle of caring and connection. In the absence of this engagement, we are more easily able to ignore their personhood, separate ourselves from them, and miss the opportunity to connect.

Violence seems to be all around us. Journalists and politicians, especially in the run-up to an election, love to create the burning platform – a sense of urgency that sendsÂ adrenalin pumpingÂ through our veins, and justifies their sound-bites and simplistic talking points.

Today is the 15th of March – the Ides of March. Itâ€™s a Roman day of religious observances, but perhaps best known as the day of Julius Caesarâ€™s assassination, in 44 BC. Itâ€™s important to me for another reasonÂ -Â my motherâ€™s birthday. She is far from my home in California, living in the south of England,Read more about The Ides of March[…]